User Interface
If you over specialize you will die a slow and painful death. No matter how much money you’re making being the soul living expert of a legacy system or technology, it will catch up to you when you inevitably have to switch jobs. The flip side is that if you over generalize, you won’t have any marketable skill, as no one will know what you’re good at and therefore how to use you. The best approach is to pick a specific area you’re passionate about, and become a generalist with a high degree of proficiency in all the relevant skills.
For a while, we didn’t have to worry about performance. Hardware was fast and cheap, and the network was more than fast enough. However, with the rise of mobile devices, we now have to start worrying about performance again.
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When I first started working exclusively as a software engineer, people who knew me as a designer were convinced I had gone mad: “Who wouldn’t want to do design?” Short answer: Me. I did design for other people for the first 7 years of my career, and let me tell you – it sucked. It sucked because all of my effort and inspiration would go into a design, only to have it reduced to, “Can you make it blue instead of brown – my wife likes blue.” That was an actual, real statement for my last design client. It wasn’t that this was the first time I had received feedback on my designs (and this was by no stretch of imagination the worst feedback I have every gotten), but it was the last straw. It would be years before I opened Photoshop and Illustrator again.
Back in 1998, I made my first real, publicly accessible website. It was NeilsMachine.com (long since taken down), and it was a “blog” before blogs were blogs. I talked about nothing at all, because I really had nothing to say. Shortly after my NeilsMachine days, I got caught up in my professional career and let all my personal sites languish and die. When I did my own consultancy, I never managed to get a website up, which always bothered me. The challenge, I found, is that when would I have time to do my own website when I was building sites for others? I made several good stabs at it – including one design that to this day is still very cool – but they never saw the light of day.